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The 
Boy Nobody 
Wanted 


A True Story 


By 
MARY C. HELM 
es 


Tne Woman’s Boarp or Foreign Missions oF THE 
PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH IN THE U. S. A. 


156 Fifth Avenue, New York City 


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THE BOY NOBODY WANTED 
By Mary C. Helm 


Sie very little was peeping out from 
beneath the arches of an old banyan tree growing 
by the side of the road. It was so small and furtive 
that the Pundit walking slowly by towards a city of 
Northern India thought it might be some lost cub of a 
wild animal creeping stealthily under the trees. It was 
so like a small crouching animal ad seemed afraid to 
be seen by human beings. 

The Pundit halted, blinking short-sighted eyes just 
as the tiny creature flashed into the sunlit roadway and 
hid behind an old stone altar under a fragrant neem 
tree. Now the neem is one of the sacred trees of India 
under whose branches stone piles used to be raised 
upon which the little girl widows were burned. The © 
Pundit, now a Christian preacher, had once been a 
holy man in the Hindu meaning of that word, before 
he heard of the Christian faith. That is, he had toiled 
long and earnestly to satisfy the religion of India; for 
it is no easy matter to please all the gods of that country. 


One of the things he had had to do in that old time 


when he was seeking to satisfy those hard taskmasters 
3 


was to worship a multitude of gods, so many that their 
very names would be as hard to learn as a hundred 
spelling lessons. 
When he was only a little lad the Pundit had been 
chosen to wash all the household gods, anointing them 
with fragrant oils, dressing them with flowers, offering 
them food. He had to burn lights before little statues 
of bronze and stone which belonged to his own family. 


And this was only a tiny part of the task of worshipping 


the gods of his race. Besides the house gods, there were 
all the gods in the temples, whose bells ring all the time 
in India. Before these temple gods he repeated incan- 
tations, that is, long strings of words that were sup- 


posed to give the person who said them powers more ~ 


than human. 

And even then, no matter how hard he tried, there 
were always gods who got their feelings hurt if they 
were neglected. To keep them in good temper religious 
people had to do many tedious things which took hours 
out of every day. 


Then, as he grew older and became a really holy 


man, he sat at the temple doorway and asked for alms, 
carrying about with him a bowl for rice, which he 


begged from passersby and upon which he kept his 
gaunt body alive. For according to the Hindu religion, 
it gives one great merit to bestow something on these — 
holy men who are seldom very clean. But now the— 


Pundit was no longer a “holy” man in the sense that 


4s 


he lived on alms at the temple doorways, but a teacher 
of languages in the Christian Mission School. 
It was cold on that January morning in 1904, seven- 


teen years ago, when the Pundit journeyed along the 
road towards his school in the city. It was cold enough 
to make one glad of the rays of the sun, the only real 
central heat known in Northern India, where the houses 
have no fires and are often chilly indeed. 

Out from behind the neem tree altar there suddenly 
sprang one of the oddest figures the Pundit ever saw. 
It looked like a baby of two years, but it was wandering 
alone and could not tell where it lived. 

The Pundit looked at this small speechless scrap of 
humanity, apparently half starved, its little ribs stick- 
ing out of its dirty, hungry-looking body, which one 
filthy cotton shirt only partially covered. Then the 
man who had been a “holy” man, but was now just a 
good man, swept up the tiny little midget and carried 
him back to the school in the city. 

“We will keep him and bring him up in the Chris- 
tian faith,” said the Indian teacher exultingly as he set 
the little waif down on the floor of the mission com- 
pound. 

“He shall escape all those tedious years I went 
through trying to keep the Hindu gods in a good tem- 
per,” is what the Pundit was really thinking. 

But the heads of the mission were wise and expe- 


5 


rienced; They knew they must not appear. 
converts unfairly. So they said: “We will fi 
the baby to the police, for perhaps its poor ] 
running around distractedly trying to find t 
child.” As it turned out the poor. little lad 
something one might call a home, and this 1 
located, giving the child into the custody of x 
tives. But not to stay there. On a Sunday some 
later the little frightened, dirty baby reappear 
time with a grown man who said he was th 
brother-in-law and only guardian. — He wanted t 
home for his wife’s little brother at the mission, e, 
it was known, homeless children not wanted cleantee 
had been taken in and cared for. Sain, ‘pron ced 
as if it were spelled Si-ee, was his name, and i in ‘one of 
India’s frequent plagues both parents had die: 
“poor baby had drifted about, beaten, ill-used, 
one’s way and not wanted by any one. 

In India famine ang plague: come hand in 


best of times is none too much, where iheres al 
people and so little surplus, it takes a er 
to bring disaster on thousands. : 


Millions of people in in India never eat more 


because the crops have failed, then very car 
comes hunger walking over all the land and 
ger always comes disease. 


That is why there are so many orphans in India that 
they cannot be cared for. It even happens that some- 


times little children are sold for bread. 


But if no one else wanted Sain the people at the 
mission and the Pundit wanted him. After the boy’s 
guardian had given him up, signing a contract to say 
so by wetting his thumb in ink and pressing it on the 
paper, the little chap was left in his new home. 


His first need was a bath and his second food. One 
might have thought it would have been the other way 
around, but if you had seen Sain, you would know one 
reason why hot water and carbolic soap should have 
been his first great need. Besides this all the world 
knows that one must not bathe directly after eating. 
Even at that one dose of hot water and one bar of car- 
bolic soap were not enough to make Sain fit for polite 
society. Neither was one meal enough for his poor 
little hungry stomach. One did not dare give him all 
he wanted at first. Even in the night he would wake 
erying for a little piece of bread. 


In a few months of good care the two-year-old baby 


grew and grew until he looked like a little four-year-old 


boy instead of a toddling two-year-old baby. Under the 
kindness that was shown him he lost his look of terror 
except when his own family came to see him. Then the 
old look of black fear came over his face again and he 
turned his back on them, denying that he ever knew 
them. 

7 


If they had not wanted the little friendless Sain in 
his starved babyhood, never again would Sain want them. 

When he was six years old he began to go to school. 
But the story of Sain is not one of a boy who broke the 
school records. He was a funny boy—quite unlike all 
the rest of the boys in the world—for he did not like 
to study. And he didn’t like to work. And he got out 
of doing things when he was not interested in them. | 
What a queer boy! Of course, it is only in India that 
there are any children like that! His guardians tried 
all sorts of experiments. They sent him to an indus- 
trial school where it was hoped that he might take 
kindly to gardening. But he was not much of a success 
at gardening. The American missionaries who had res- 
cued him and the poor old Pundit who wanted to bring 
him up so that he could be a teacher of the Christian 
faith must have been much discouraged. 

But all of a sudden something happened to Sain, — 
who had up to that time had such a pathetic and unwel- 
comed existence. It is a thing that often happens to 
boys—and girls too. He found the thing he was inter- 
ested in. He began to be conscious that skill was in his 
fingers, if he could only bring it out. The longing to 
fashion things with tools came over him and he began 
to study carpentering. 

No sooner was he put into the carpenter shop than 
he became a different lad. He was interested and alive. 
He did not try any longer to escape work. He ceased 

8 


being listless and dull. He became that happy crea- 
ture, the person who has found his place in the world. 

Last year Sain finished his course and became a 
master woodworker, able to make the finest furniture. 
He is now twenty-one and is ready to set up business 
for himself. He is tall and handsome and manly. A 
member of a Christian church, eager to help others 
-even as he has been helped. 

When the Pundit looks at him now and remembers 
the cold morning many years ago when he carried 
home in his arms that little unwanted baby, he must 
feel very glad for Sain is no longer unwanted anywhere. 
And the Pundit knows that having rescued “one of 
these little ones” for a fine manhood is surely worth 
more than many baths in the sacred waters of the 
Ganges or many bowls of rice offered to the temple gods. 


December 1921 


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